Ruling Party Charms a Turkish City With New Take on Secular Heritage

"The only language the West understands is success," said Saban Copuroglu, 41, head of the Kayseri chapter. "As Turkey opens to the outside, Kayseri has seen big changes, and we didn't want to just stand by and watch them happen."

The influence of Anatolian businessmen such as Copuroglu is remaking this city, as it is the rest of Turkey. Day flights to Kayseri and other remote centers are often filled with young businessmen. Stores marketing Kayseri's exports -- furniture and appliances, for instance -- line stately boulevards. Copuroglu, in a dark suit with a green tie that bordered on fluorescent, calls these businessmen "the new generation."

As he spoke, the banner for Gul fluttered outside. His loyalties to Gul and Erdogan were evident, echoing the sense among many businessmen in the city that the party has managed to both reflect and articulate their ambitions.

"Both represent the real Anatolia," Copuroglu said. "They're the best example of 'we' instead of 'me.' "

The mayor here is Mehmet Ozhaseki, who was first elected in 1994 as a member of a ruling party predecessor, the more avowedly religious Welfare Party, which was banned in 1998. He won office a year later with its successor, the Virtue Party. That organization was banned in 2001, and Ozhaseki joined the Justice and Development Party, winning office again in 2004 with more than 70 percent of the vote.

The party's secular critics -- still entrenched in the military, judiciary and bureaucracy -- suspect a hidden agenda; with Gul's election, they feared, the party would reveal its colors and press ahead with Islamization. Particularly upsetting to many was the prospect of Gul's wife, who wears a head scarf, living in the presidential palace, a citadel of the secular state. But religion figures little in Ozhaseki's administration, which, like Erdogan's government, has tried to turn day-to-day civic effectiveness into an ideology.

Mehmet Yuksel, a 61-year-old retiree, stood with a rake and a packed lunch at an urban garden set up by Ozhaseki's office, where residents pay less than $100 a year for a small plot. He gave his version of the trains running on time -- traffic lights worked, he said, a tramway connected the city, workers were busy on a new stadium, and green space has grown eightfold.

Problems with water or electricity? "You call them, and in 15 minutes, a car comes and sorts it out," Yuksel said.

Across town, after midday prayers, women in head scarves and cheap sandals gathered at a soup kitchen, known as an asevi, that opened last year. There are about 40 around town, organized by the mayor's office, serving 5,000 people a day.

"Even when our son got married, they went and got help for him," said Fadime Adsiz, a 55-year-old woman in line. She listed the aid: furniture, beds, pots and pans, blankets, appliances, even a bus ticket so her son could travel to Istanbul for his military service.

"My son, too," added Nirgul Dener. Mustafa, 24, was married five months ago.

Secular With a Difference

Kayseri is a conservative city, and the debates raging along Turkey's fault lines -- between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, the power of the center and the emerging periphery in Kayseri and elsewhere -- are reflected here. The state's view of secularism, in which religion is subservient to the state and its bureaucracy, is seen as anachronistic by many ruling party supporters.